What it would probably lack is the billion years of baggage humans are saddled with that give us a full assortment of needs and urges, including an urge to survive. If we achieved AI with a top-down, planned approach, there's no reason that a robot would "want" anything that wasn't built in. Consider all the things that make you want to eliminate the competition and tell me why any of those things would need to be part of a robots core goals and not tempered with higher goals? On the other hand, we might build AI by basically copying humans, in which case, we just have a new species of human built on different underlying hardware.

By "readers", I meant blu-ray drives/players. I was talking about what it would take to move the bandwidth of the truckload of dense storage media from the realm of the theoretical to the realm of the practical. If each disk represents hours of reading/writing at either end then, in addition to the physical transport, you have to consider the writing of the disks at one end, the packaging and loading, the transport itself, the unpacking and unloading, loading the storage media into readers, then the actual read time.

Other great quotes from that site:

So, sorry if I misunderstood, but were you trying for a funny mod?

Many, if not most of the vegetables you eat are picked by workers on gigantic tracts of industrial farmland with miles to even the nearest port-a-potty and an antagonistic attitude towards breaks from management.

Polio shows no symptoms in 90% of cases, even though the infected are still contagious. So 417 reported cases means at least 4170 infected individuals. Not to mention that many cases with symptoms will not have made it into those statistics, so the number is probably much higher.

The problem with that is that it's not a very useful measure of bandwidth. Sure a million blu-ray disks being physically transported represents a lot of theoretical bandwidth, but, in order to realize it as practical bandwidth, you have to write it at one end with a million writers and read it at the other end with a million readers. If we're talking movies then the individual watching them is a bottleneck. The maximum AV speed on a Blu-ray disk is something like 48 Mbits per second. The actual typical bit rate is more around 20 Mbits per second or lower. If you can get within an order of magnitude of that bit-rate over the network, then you're beating the practical bandwidth of that truck full of disks even if the theoretical bandwidth blows the network connection away.

It's pretty straightforward. You pay for access to the Internet through your ISP, which may be Comcast. Netflix pays for access to the Internet through their ISPs, although their service providers are probably a different tier than the consumer level service you're getting. The way it's supposed to work is that you're both connected to the Internet, so data you send between each other is covered by whatever plan you have with your ISP. What Comcast is doing here is double-dipping. They want to charge you for sending and receiving data to and from Netflix and also charge Netflix for sending and receiving data to and from you. The effect of this is that Netflix basically ends up paying twice for bandwidth. You may shrug your shoulders and say "why should I care", but who exactly do you think ultimately pays for this? The answer is that _you_ pay if you're a Comcast customer who uses Netflix (or any other service they manage to extort this way).

This is basically a telecom finding yet another way to charge hidden fees to customers. Ever actually look at the bill from pretty much any telecom such as Comcast? Ever look at the fees section? Where they directly charge you for all the taxes and other fees that anyone charges them? Things that every other business rolls into the final price as part of the cost of doing business but telecoms somehow get a pass to do? It allows them to lie to you about the price of your service when you sign up. Ever try to ask them in advance what your actual basic monthly bill will be when trying to order service and they can't or won't tell you? They're scum, plain and simple.

As businesses that require extensive, distributed infrastructure (mostly situated on property acquired through eminent domain, variances, etc. for the public good) telecoms tend to be what's referred to as "natural monopolies". As natural monopolies, they're meant to be heavily regulated since they generally can't even exist without massive exceptions and exceptional favors being granted to them. Trouble is, as vast, powerful monopolies, they distort the market they exist in and capture the regulatory system. They should be forced to act as non-profits and run as public utilities considering the massive abuses they perpetrate constantly. Trouble is, that won't fly well in the US where too many people are severely opposed to that kind of regulation of "private" industry, completely blind to the fact that the industry in question only exists because it gets the benefits of being a public institution without actually being one.

My thoughts exactly. This should be treated as extortion.

Repeatedly sending big, high def movie files over the internet backbone seems so wasteful.

Wasteful of what, exactly? Most of the costs in networking are fixed. You use a little bit more electricity to send more data but, generally speaking, most of the physical equipment involved doesn't really experience extra wear and tear when a connection is saturated versus being unused (some that's poorly designed might from, for example, overheating). In other words, if you graphed it, the real cost of bandwidth per unit is going to go down the more bandwidth is actually used.
Obviously you run into problems if the network is oversaturated, but it's not somehow a waste to actually use bandwidth once all the infrastructure for it is in place.

Since aquifers may extend tens or hundreds of miles, a couple of miles vertically just doesn't seem like that much.

I remember when my car was stolen right out of a mall parking lot quite a while back now. I met the police in the mall security office. They literally laughed in my face about the whole thing while taking the report. They also obviously weren't bothered with checking surveillance video since they were in the security office at the time and didn't even ask mall security about it.
My car was later found abandoned on the side of the road with the battery dead (it turned out I had a failing alternator, which may have saved me the whole car). After it was found, the officer following up was very interested in questioning _me_ about why there was a scale in the trunk (it was a broken one from the bakery I was working in at the time).

That one bothered me at the time. Since then I've become more relaxed about it. There are actually a lot of possibilities for solid matter that aren't on the periodic table. Things like exotic purely non-baryonic matter, or combinations of baryonic and non-baryonic matter. Atoms with electrons replaced by Muons, for example. Many of the theoretical ideas for such exotic forms of matter have been ruled out, but there's a still a _lot_ out there. We are not yet remotely at the point where we can know for sure what might be possible. We're not even remotely at the point where we know everything that's possible in normal chemistry, after all, so why should exotic materials be any different.

The Moon may not be a good example because it does extract energy from the Earth (from its rotation via tidal forces) so that its orbital distance is actually increasing over time. Not arguing agains the gravity tractor, just saying that maybe wasn't the best example.

That's already happened. See the _Fantastic Four_ movie. Not the one with Jessica Alba. The one from 1993?

What, you didn't like watching people teleported into wacky water tubes right out of Looney Tunes? Or the tiresomely overdone: big monster chasing character gets killed by bigger monster which inexplicably keeps chasing the character, abandoning the giant meal it just acquired? The inexplicable supernova that destroys the Romulans (I mean, I can see Next Generation level tech being unable to prevent planetary destruction from a supernova, but not somehow destroying the inhabitants before they could evacuate, since it would take years for the explosion to get there). Or "red matter". Or the inexplicable black hole that "red matter" can create that's capable of sucking up a supernova explosion, including the parts that have already escaped at the speed of light, while not being _more_ dangerous than the supernova. Or how Kirk ended up in the same cave as Spock (you could explain it away as vulcan telepathy guiding him there, but Spock didn't seem to expect him, so the only answer is obviously "the force" guided him). Or lens flares, Lens Flares, LENS FLARES!!!

I still managed to enjoy the movie, but that doesn't mean I didn't recognize that it was junk.